


Holy Clockwork Angels

by ghostrunner



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-28
Updated: 2010-05-27
Packaged: 2017-10-19 12:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostrunner/pseuds/ghostrunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steampunk AU complete with airships, gaslight, Victorian costume fantasies, and clockwork… everything. Ruby and Jo have to save the world. Probably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Holy Clockwork Angels

bonus content:  
[They are You and I](http://ghostrunner7.livejournal.com/88525.html), fanmix by [](http://brilligspoons.livejournal.com/profile)[**brilligspoons**](http://brilligspoons.livejournal.com/)

\--

The moment between air and ground seemed to stretch, as the blur that had knocked her flying resolved into a figure standing at the mouth of the alley. An inordinate amount of her time, Jo reflected dourly in the interim, seemed to be spent in dark, wet alleyways.

Her shoulder hit the pavement in the middle of a puddle, broken glass from the window raining down around her. Time shuddered back to normal.

Jo levered herself up on hands and knees, water soaking through her sensible tweed trousers and jacket. Through the unpinned fall of her own blonde waves she spotted something just on the edge of the puddle that gleamed in the gaslight. Pearl-handled and inlaid with silver, shining like a promise no one intends to keep.

She’d dropped her flintlock pistol.

The figure at the end of the alley made a low, grating sound like a chainsaw trying to laugh.

“All alone, little huntress,” the thing growled, stalking closer, resolving into a man as the ringing in her head settled into a pounding ache rather than a blinding one. Jo watched him move and thought, ‘edged joints, to be sure.’ She gathered her limbs underneath her, carefully not looking at the pistol.

“You might have picked a cleaner alley to ambush me in,” she complained in a flat tone. The cobblestones were wet, but she dug for the edge of one with the toe of her boot, testing its setting. “I’m likely to catch something.”

The face under the low-brimmed hat was human, the broken blood vessels of a career drunkard, or a career boxer across the cheeks. That explained the edged joints; they were very popular among people in the business of hitting and getting hit.

“Pneumonia,” he promised, “will be the least of your-”

Jo dove for the pistol in the middle of his sentence, and then bit off a shriek of sudden pain, her grip on the handle slipping as the man drove his boot, with the rest of his not inconsiderable weight behind it, into her ribs. She took the opportunity to slice backwards and up with her boot knife, striking deep at the muscle of his thigh. He staggered away, pulled out the knife, kicked her again. Her head rebounded off the cobblestones.

“That,” he snarled from what seemed like a great distance away, “was a stupid move.” He pulled back her own knife for a blow.

There came the quiet, but sharp tap of a lady’s heel from the mouth of the alley and he paused, staring back over his shoulder at the shrouded figure in unrelieved widow’s black that stood like a dainty crow between him and the street.

Jo smiled through a mouthful of blood. “I don’t believe you’ve had the pleasure of meeting my companion,” she said as clearly as she could manage under the circumstances. “Apparently your friends failed to detain her.”

\--

  
Two hours ago.

The sweep of black crinoline over wet cobblestones. Jo reaches for the dropped flintlock. The window into the alley shatters before her weight.

Two women walk into a pawn shop.

They were an odd pair, but the proprietor thought nothing of it. A very pretty blonde and a slender figure in widow’s weeds, a veil obscuring her face and hair. The blonde walked up to the counter, the soles of her shoes silent on the tile. Her hair was pinned up, like any respectable lady. Her suit was a winter-weight tweed and she wore trousers rather than a skirt.

The proprietor dragged his gaze from her legs and gave her his most charming smile. “How may I assist you, miss?”

Her friend in black mourning lingered near the cases of nautical instruments. The blonde smiled back. “I’m looking for a set of glass photoplates.”

“Oh,” said the proprietor. “We have quite a nice selection of photoplates in excellent condition. Would you be wanting a flashbox as well?”

“No,” said the woman, “just the photoplates. And a rather specific set of photoplates, at that. I heard you had some, filmed with amber?”

The proprietor blanched. “No, miss, I’ve nothing like that. Got a lovely set, near new, daguerreotypes come out clear as day. But I’ve never seen anything filmed in amber.”

She undid the single button of her suit jacket. His eyebrows, and his hopes, rose until he saw the smooth bore flintlock pistol tucked into her belt.

“Really.” She made no sign, didn’t even turn her head. The black draped woman glided across the storefront to a display of faceted crystal barometers. Very beautiful, very expensive. She reached out with one lace-gloved, black-nailed hand.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured, tipping the instrument to shatter on the floor. The proprietor flinched. The blonde smiled sunnily into his face.

\--

“And the point of that was?”

“We’re beating the brush,” said Jo, strolling calmly down the avenue. “Spread the word around, see what pops out to ambush us.”

“Lovely,” said Ruby.

“Cheer up,” Jo told her. “Or don’t. But either way, go visit the Arm and Hammer and push them about amber filmed photoplates.”

Ruby sighed. “And what will you be doing?”

“I’ll be visiting the Nelson. And pushing them about amber filmed photoplates.”

\--

A man behind her in the shop. The window into the alley shatters. Jo dives for the flintlock.

The rustle of black crinoline and lace over wet cobblestones.

The points of Ruby’s claws through the man’s neck.

“Alright,” said Jo, thickly, trying to talk with only one side of her mouth. “That did not quite go as planned.”

Ruby carefully placed a few more cubes of very expensive ice in her handkerchief with the tips of her claws and pressed it back to Jo’s jaw. “No, indeed it did not,” she murmured. “However, we did find those responsible for the ghosts.”

“How were they doing it?” Jo asked, taking the ice off her cheek briefly. She jerked away irritably when Ruby went to nudge it back into place and got pricked with steel claws for her trouble.

“It was actually quite ingenious,” said the demon as though nothing had happened. “They had found a way to capture a wandering spirit with a japanned box and glass plate photography. When they shone a lantern burning potassium sulfate through the glass they could control the spirit.” She sounded quite impressed.

Jo stared at her, the numbing pain in her jaw forgotten. “That’s horrible,” she said flatly.

Ruby raised her eyebrows. “Yes, well. It’s over and done now.”

“You smashed the plates?”

“I smashed the plates,” she echoed tiredly. “Whilst you were languishing unconscious and blessedly much quieter.”

Jo made a horrible face. Or rather, half of a horrible face. “Thank you,” she said very deliberately,” for taking care of it.”

Ruby visibly relented. “Not at all.” She went on replacing the ice in the basin. “I have some less felicitous news,” she said carefully.”

Jo narrowed her eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s the topsail.”

“Ah!” Jo flung herself backward to lie prostrate on the couch. “I knew it!”

“You were right,” Ruby continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “It has definitely developed a tear.”

Jo blew out a long sigh from her prone position. “Time to limp back to Bobby’s, then.”

\--

Under normal circumstances Bobby’s was a day’s to a day and a half’s flight from London. Moving at half power with the topsail down, forced to steer by tilting the stabilizer wings, it took almost three days. When the vast mechanical graveyard of Robert Singer’s Airship Refueling and Repair came into view through the starboard windscreen Jo nearly wept with relief.

She flashed the running lights from green-yellow-yellow to green-green-green and prepared to move into the mooring pole.

“There’s a southwesterly gust,” said a cool voice behind her. “You’re a half-point off.”

Jo rolled her eyes where Ruby couldn’t see and swung the wheel accordingly before glaring back over her shoulder.

Ruby, out of equal parts personal preference and desire to annoy Bobby, who hated her with a complete lack of subtlety, had changed from her plain-fronted black mourning dress and veiled hat into a black silk mourning dress with an extravagant bustle and festoons of handmade black lace. A miniature tricorn hat with black gauze veil and pheasant feathers was pinned at a rakish angle atop her upswept hair.

Jo sighed.

“Smile,” the demon advised her, “or I’ll bring a parasol, too.”

Minutes later, steadying the ladder for Ruby’s mechanically graceful descent, Jo wondered if she couldn’t have convinced her to give up a couple of layers of petticoats as well.

“’Bout time you came back,” she heard Bobby call gruffly as he came up to the platform to greet her. “Topsail, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” called Jo. “You were right, I was right, I should have come back six months ago, I’m a terrible excuse for a pilot.”

Bobby grumbled an indistinguishable denial and glared as Ruby jumped the last seven or eight feet to the platform. She smiled toothily from behind her veil and Jo jumped hastily into the breach.

“There’s a tear along the haft of the sail, Bobby,” she said. “Ship won’t move in anything shy of a hurricane.”

“I’ll get a crew on it,” Bobby said without taking his eyes from the still-smiling demon. “Come on inside. Got a message for you from the Winchesters.”

Jo raised her eyebrows sardonically, feeling Ruby tense beside her. “Sam and Dean deigning to communicate with lowly mortals such as ourselves? This I must see.”

“Come on, now. You know that’s not fair.”

Unable to take it back Jo simply shrugged apologetically and followed Bobby down into the warren of tunnels and workrooms that comprised his shipyard, trailed by the still-silent Ruby.

\--

“Find the key,” Jo read aloud. She looked at Ruby and then, finding her wide-eyed shrug unhelpful, at Bobby.

“That’s all they got,” he said, offering her a lowball glass with close to three fingers of scotch in it. Jo took a sip, winced, and gave the glass to Ruby.

“I can see that. The seer they went to gave them a prophecy for me.”

“Not much of a prophecy,” said Ruby, sweeping her veils aside and tossing back the remainder of the scotch.

“Well, it’s what you’ve got,” Bobby snapped, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his mechanic’s coveralls. “Take it or leave it.”

Jo opened her mouth to attempt impossible amelioration, but was spared by the entrance of one of Bobby’s assistant engineers who slipped in, touched the brim of his hat to Jo and Ruby, and handed Bobby a grease-smeared sheet of loose leaf paper.

Bobby squinted at it for a minute. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Whole jib doesn’t need to be replaced. Just need a new sail. Take a day or so. Eight hours maybe, if you’re in a hurry to get out of here.”

“God, yes,” said Ruby.

“Not really,” said Jo without missing a beat. “Unless there was any kind of urgency attached to this prophecy?”

Bobby shrugged. “No idea. ‘Find the key’ was all they got.”

“Then we might as well do it right. Take some time to restock.” Jo struggled out of the cracked leather armchair which, as far as she could tell, had grown organically from the floorboards of Bobby’s parlor thirty years ago. “Havisham still run a wholesale market?” she asked.

Bobby nodded, and pulled his eyes away from Ruby drumming her claws on his sidetable to glance at his watch. “They should still be open. Market runs all night in good weather.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” said Jo as Ruby rose from her chair with considerably more ease. “Can we borrow a car?”

\--

Because she refused to let Ruby drive anything as long as she was physically capable, it was Jo who ended up bumping the borrowed truck over the worst-kept road in the civilized world and then parking in careless disgust before the street front of the Havisham Wholesale Market.

“That was diverting,” said Ruby as Jo opened her door and helped her to step down to the cobblestones. She certainly did not require the assistance, but Jo had found her early childhood training very difficult to resist and rather automatically opened doors and held chairs for Ruby.

“At least we’re more or less in one piece,” she shot back. “Unlike the last time I let you drive an automobile.” She pretended she couldn’t see Ruby rolling her eyes behind her veil.

“Right then,” said Jo briskly. She squared her shoulders to the gates of the outdoor market. “Do you want foodstuffs and medical supplies or toiletries and luxuries?”

Ruby actually lifted her veil to give Jo a disbelieving look.

“Okay,” Jo allowed. “Silly question.”

\--

She was in the middle of bargaining over three sacks of flour with a completely unreasonable, grandmotherly woman, but that was no excuse for assuming that the brush of steel against her shoulder was Ruby, and not instantly going for a weapon.

Jo had plenty of time to reflect upon that particular shortcoming as the unfamiliar demon cranked her arm the wrong way and forced her to her knees.

“Hello, lovely,” said the demon. He was a tall young man, or at least he was shaped like one, with a gentleman’s top hat pulled down over one eye, and he was backed by another two male demons and a female. They stood smiling congenially at Jo like they were on a pleasant Sunday outing. One of the males shook a clawed finger at the flour seller when the woman opened her mouth to call out.

“Now, now,” said the demon holding Jo. “There’s no particular need for a fuss. You’ve got something of mine, lovely. Hand it over like a good girl and no one gets hurt.” He considered the blood darkening Jo’s shirt sleeve where he’d dug his claws into her arm and added, “…Much.”

People in the crowded market were starting to notice, but the tightly packed stalls made sightlines difficult and Jo seriously doubted the on-hand market security would realize what was going on in time to be any actual help.

“Give me what’s mine, little huntress,” purred the demon, his claws a steel vise of pain around Jo’s upper arm. He would dislocate her shoulder if he pushed it much farther, but she discovered she could still move from her elbow down.

“And what is it I have, exactly?” Jo gritted, straining behind her back with her fingertips.

For some reason she couldn’t explain even to herself, she was expecting him to demand Ruby, who was probably still dithering over scented soaps. So she was shocked when the demon leaned close, bared pointed porcelain teeth in a rictus grin and whispered, “Where is the key?”

“What?” Jo jerked back from the demon’s stale steam and burnt wiring breath and winced when the movement dug his claws further into her arm.

The demon sighed. “Don’t play games, girl. Lilith doesn’t like your silly human games.” He smiled again, watching Jo’s face carefully. “You remember Lilith, don’t you? You remember the kind of games she likes.”

Jo remembered the bodies and the notes and the scorched rubble she’d come home to and kept her face rigidly blank.

“We can play games if you want, I suppose.” The demon glanced around at the staring customers with a kind of exaggerated innocence. “But it could be so much easier. Just give me the key. It can all be over very soon.”

“Yes,” said Jo. “It will be.”

She twisted her lower arm back around and pulled the trigger on her flintlock, firing straight up into the demon’s body. The electric crackle and flare as the life burned out of him helped to take some of the pain in her upper arm and she thumbed the hammer back down, rising to one knee as she swung the pistol around to the nearest watching demon.

He shook off his openmouthed surprise, moving with mechanical speed, and she was too slow by half. Her arm seizing up and refusing to cooperate. The demon caught the lapel of her coat in sharp steel claws, staggering when she kicked out straight at his knee but coming on undaunted. He clicked his canines in her face, reaching for her throat.

And then Ruby was there. She buried her knife in the demon’s neck, severing spine from motor control and electric death flared in his eyes.

Jo switched hands with a grimace and brought the pistol back up to shoot the female high in the chest. Not bad for left handed.

Ruby whirled on the last, but he put on a surprising burst of speed and was gone, leaping to the top of a stall and disappearing over the neighboring roofs.

She came over to where Jo was levering herself up with her left elbow and the aid of a stall counter and touched her blood-darkened sleeve gently.

“Can’t I leave you alone for five minutes?” She demanded, covering the note of concern with steel-rasped sarcasm.

Jo sighed, examining the punctures in her bicep.

“Wrangle the flour out of that harpy, we need to get back to Bobby’s.”

Ruby gave the old market woman a slow, considering look. “Those demons were Lilith’s,” she said to Jo without looking at her.

“I know,” said Jo. “There might be something to this key prophecy after all.”

\--

Jo clenched her left hand around another glass of scotch, wincing as Bobby cleaned her right arm.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked, gruffly. He was still upset with himself for not sending one of his shop boys with them to Havisham.

Jo hissed in pain, gulped a little scotch. “Find the key, I suppose.”

Ruby made an amused noise. “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s reassuring to see your planning methods are unchanged by either pain or liquor.”

Bobby scowled over at her. “If you’d been with her instead of gallivanting around…”

“We’re flying a little blinder than usual, here,” Jo cut him off.

“Not by much,” Ruby murmured.

“… perhaps we should figure out what we’re actually up against,” Jo finished with a pointed glare in Ruby’s direction.

“You have a course of action in mind?”

Jo took a fortifying breath. “I think it’s time we consult the Visionary.”

Ruby made a horrible face behind her veils. Jo could tell.

\--

Ruby had, to the best of Jo’s knowledge, always hated the Visionary.

“She looks right through me,” she complained. “It is deeply unnerving.”

Jo had never quite understood how the Visionary could make Ruby feel threatened, but then, she wasn’t a demon. Who knew what that slight, ancient figure saw in Ruby?

She tapped the glass casing of the barometer and watched the needle swing, let a little more hydrogen into the mix to compensate. If the Visionary could see what was inside Ruby, the cogs and wheels that made her up, could she read her intentions also? Could she tell Jo what to do?

Jo swung the ship’s wheel two points north, put one hand on the full-brake, and watched the clouds sweep by, wondering.

\--

“Any sign?”

Ruby tossed back her veils against the wind for the thousandth time and put her brass telescope to her eye again.

“Nothing!” she called back. “Take us a point and a half east!”

Jo wrenched the Dashforth into a sweeping right turn, the stars wheeling dizzily overhead, lamenting bitterly the impossibility of finding the Visionary through any sane navigational method, or even the ridiculously quaint divination Ruby swore by.

She had stared, bewildered and frustrated at the fall of thrown dice and bird bones for long minutes before announcing, in a resigned sort of way, “Apparently, she is wandering the stars in unpredictable perambulations. And there’s something about time.” She had looked up and met Jo’s eyes wryly. “Time, and a bubble.”

Jo had blown out an exasperated sigh and said, “Wandering around the desert with a telescope it is, then,” and gone back to the helm to lay in a less sane course, ignoring Ruby’s muttered, “Or we could give her up for the useless old bat she is,” with the ease of long practice.

“Anything now?” Jo had to shout over the rising winds, but she knew Ruby could hear her without fault.

“Nothing!” she got back from the still-searching demon. “Try, wait! … Wait, there! _three whole points south_! We’ll come in on top of her!”

Jo gritted her teeth and eased back on the hydrogen, starting the long swing southward. The points of the Dashforth’s stabilizing side sails stabbing up into the clear night sky and down at the moonlit sands of the desert below, respectively.

Completing the turn and bringing the horizon back to true showed her the Visionary’s house, same as ever. A multi-story (four? Five? Thirty?), gabled townhouse, trim and window shutters all painted different colors for (knowing the Visionary) some terribly obscure but equally important reason, moving slowly across the frozen desert by the light of the stars on the back of a giant tortoise. The tortoise swung its head slowly side to side as it inched along. Jo had never been able to decide if it was mechanical or not.

It had to be. Surely?

Jo eased the engines to an idle hum, using the winds and the topsail to close in on the mooring pole atop the highest gable of the Visionary’s house.

\--

The house was unchanged, Jo thought to herself as they were led by a silent, obsequious servant in red livery down seemingly endless halls, past doors of every size and style which, based on their placement around corners, at least some of them had to lead into the same rooms.

Ruby sniffed disdainfully, wrapped once more in black walking dress and silk shawl and veils, she was carrying Jo’s swordcane and tapped it against the floorboards with excessive force at each step. She widened her eyes when Jo sent her a dirty look, the picture of innocence.

The house hadn’t changed at all; the Visionary was completely different.

Shown through the goblin-engraved double doors into what Jo had always privately thought of as the Visionary’s Inner Sanctum, she stopped, shocked at the sight of the hall. What had formerly been a bare stone floor was now covered in Oriental rugs and low couches piled high with Chinese silks. Cast bronze braziers smoldered in every corner, burning frankincense and sandalwood, handfuls of jasmine, and something that looked like white sand and smelled like a thousand years of musty books.

The Visionary sat, as she always had, on a dais at the end of the room opposite the door they had come in. Every time Jo had been there she’d been led to a different door, and every time the Visionary had been waiting at the opposite end. As always she sat hunched over a long, low table surrounded by precarious stacks and rolls of parchment with a gold calligraphy pen in one long-nailed hand.

The Visionary was a different woman.

Where the bent, mad-eyed crone had sat, there was now a slender young woman wrapped in the Visionary’s robes. Her hair was as wild and unkempt as before, but dark and glossy where the other’s had been grizzled and streaked with grey. The face she raised to them was unlined and girlish, though tattooed with the same swirling lines and dots Jo remembered.

“Are you the new Visionary, then?” Jo asked before Ruby could elbow her into silence.

The Visionary, who appeared to be as nearsighted as her predecessor, blinked her moon-pale eyes in surprise. “New?” she repeated. “New, yes. But the same still. Time for a change, all things turning, turning, burning bright and new.”

Jo took this to mean, ‘yes.’

“Very well, then, New Visionary-“

“The same,” the new Visionary corrected sharply.

From the corner of her eye Jo saw Ruby bury her face in her hands.

“Ah, yes. Same Visionary,-”

“You are seeking a key,” the Visionary cut in again in a sweet, querulous voice completely unlike the previous Visionary’s rough muttering. Her pen had never stopped scratching.

“We… yes, Visionary.”

The seer beckoned them closer with one tattooed finger. Ruby folded her arms, tucking Jo’s swordcane under her elbow, and wordlessly refused to move. Jo rolled her eyes and climbed the dais to sit awkwardly across the low table. The Visionary scratched never-ending lines and circles and spirals, occasionally, for no reason Jo could see, tossing aside one parchment for another. All the scrolls were covered in her strange circles as she went back to them over and over, changing, adding, reinforcing things.

Her handwriting was neater than her predecessor’s.

“Clever snake,” murmured the Visionary. The circles she was constantly sketching became serpentine coils, the suggestion of scales wrapped around and around what might have been a faceted jewel.

“Um,” said Jo.

The Visionary continued wrapping the snake’s tail around and between and through her other prophecies. She skimmed her long nails down a pile of papers, selecting one seemingly at random. She spread it out in front of her and Jo could see, squinting sideways, patterns that might have been scales on the edges of nearly every circle in ink that had dried years ago.

“Clever, clever snake with her whisperings and her charms and her deals.” Jo froze, and then slowly turned her head to look back at Ruby who stared at her in silence. Still as a woman cast from bronze. Nothing in her eyes.

The Visionary went on scratching at the old parchment with renewed enthusiasm. “Made a key,” she said, drawing a line to bisect her latest circle and giving it prongs. “Made a key to replace God.”

“What?” said Ruby and Jo together. Ruby stopped rolling her eyes and became raptly attentive.

The Visionary ignored them, still drawing lines that intersected in groups of five between the snake’s scales. “Clever snake. Upsetting creation with a little key.” She trailed off, switching parchments once more and muttering, “Burning, burning,” under her breath, drawing different circles.

“Who is the snake, Visionary? Who made the key?” Ruby pressed, drawing closer to the dais.  
The red-clothed attendants stirred uneasily.

The Visionary didn’t look up, still muttering to herself.

“Visionary? Who made the key?” echoed Jo. Behind her Ruby started tapping her foot obnoxiously.

The seer raised her head suddenly, cutting off in the middle of the word ‘burning,’ which Jo didn’t understand, but she doubted anything good would come of it.

“Who made the key?” Jo repeated softly.

“Hephaestus,” said the Visionary.

\--

“So, we’re looking for a volcano.”

Ruby shuffled carelessly. Flipped the top three cards. The Sun, the Tower, the Devil. She tapped one claw against the middle card.

“That’s where we’ll find Hephaestus, yes.” She seemed worryingly eager at the prospect, but then, Ruby was often enthusiastic about questionably safe things. Her drive to find Hephaestus didn’t have to mean anything, Jo told the niggling doubt in the pit of her stomach.

“Which volcano?”

Ruby shrugged. “Any volcano.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Any volcano you travel into with the intent of finding Hephaestus will contain Hephaestus’s forge.”

“…We have to travel into a volcano?”

Ruby laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry, Jo. It will be fine.” More soberly she added, “This may be terribly important.”

Jo remembered the scales of the snake wrapped around and through a dozen separate prophecies. She looked into Ruby’s dark eyes for a long minute. Searching for truth with a deep sense of futility. Inside Ruby it was all smoke and mirrors and machinery. She knew this, but she’d never been able to break the longing for more.

“Where’s the nearest volcano?” she said.

Ruby smiled, and curved her hand over Jo’s arm.

\--

Mount Tendürek. Anatolia.

The last eruption was in 1855, Ruby told her as they swept south across the Doğubeyazıt plain, south from Mount Ararat.

Jo saw it coming for miles. The elongated cone of the shield volcano rose five thousand feet into the air.

The drifting column of smoke was also a good indication of its position.

Jo tilted the stabilizing wings and began circling the caldera. The view out the port windscreen of a deep, smoking abyss was uninviting, to say the least.

“We have to go into that?” Jo asked.

Ruby tapped her claws idly on the sheet of glass separating them from the depths of the volcano. “I suppose so,” she said, doubtfully.

“I don’t like this.”

“So you’ve said. Repeatedly.”

Jo rolled her eyes, nudging the helm toward the high point of the rim.

“Relax,” said Ruby. “Everything will be fine.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jo. “We’ll climb down into a volcano and talk to something that thinks it’s a god and everything will be fine.”

“Why do you have to do that?”

“Do what?” Jo frowned over at Ruby.

“Assume that everything divine or supernatural is just another mechanical thing that hasn’t realized it’s a machine, yet.”

“Ruby… fifty years ago people thought demons were supernatural.”

“I don’t just mean demons, Jo. I know I’m a machine. But where did the first of the demons come from? Someone made us. Where did Lilith come from?”

“Hell,” said Jo, darkly.

“Do you even really believe in Hell? Or is it just a… linguistic holdover?” The question apparently rhetorical, Ruby turned back to the view.

“Ruby…”

“Let’s just go down,” said the demon quietly.

They tethered the Dashforth to the rim with the anchors and chains and lowered the rope ladder. Jo peered down through the hatch into the belly of the volcano.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” she told Ruby.

“I’ll go first, if you’re scared.” The demon grinned at her glare and swung one leg down onto the first step. Choosing practicality over sartorial impression for the only time in Jo’s acquaintance with her, Ruby had changed into trousers and boots. Both women wore naval pea coats and carried pistols. There was no way to manage a swordcane down a rope ladder.

Jo let Ruby get roughly ten feet ahead of her before starting down the ladder herself. Ruby’s weight steadied it somewhat, but the ship itself swayed between the lengths of chain. The air was sulfurous and chill and the wind whipped sharply at Jo’s hair and clothes. Stinging in her eyes and making her hands clumsy on the ladder rungs.

After long, torturous minutes of climbing Jo was wind blind and disoriented enough to bring her bootheel down on Ruby’s hand. She jerked her foot back at Ruby’s cry of alarm and peered down at her.

“Why did you stop?” she shouted over the howl of the wind.

“End of the ladder,” Ruby shouted back.

They stared down into the volcano below them. Its depths obscured by smoke.

“Ruby…”

“I’m going to jump,” Ruby shouted at her.

“You’re going to what?! It could be miles!”

“Or it could be ten feet. We came this far!”

She climbed down until she was hanging from the last rung and looked up at Jo.

“Ruby, don’t!” Jo pleaded.

Her lips moved, but Jo couldn’t make out the words over the wind and the blood pounding in her ears. Ruby let go.

Dangling in the biting wind above the mouth of a volcano, Jo cursed demons, prophets, false gods, and several mechanical processes. Her mind played back the last moment. Ruby mouthing, “Have faith,” at her before dropping into a volcano.

“My mother was right,” Jo told the wind. “I have no judgment to speak of.”

She stared down, trying to follow Ruby with her eyes but the smoke seemed to hang just at the end of the ladder. No telling how far she would fall.

Have faith.

Ruby with her ridiculous reliance on divination and mysticism. How do you hold onto faith when everything once thought magical has been revealed to be made of metal?

Did having faith in a devious mechanical demon count? Or did it simply make one an idiot?

Jo let go.

\--

There was an impression of weightlessness in the smoke. A sense that the whole world had turned to ash and wrapped itself around her like a smothering blanket. Jo listened to the echo of the wind above her and feared she would fall forever.

Hitting the ground came as a sickening shock. The smoke was gone, the floor she was sprawled gracelessly upon was rough stone. She heard the sliding crunch of Ruby’s boots on the rocky ground before the demon’s head appeared over her.

“Is anything broken?” she asked.

Jo wiggled her fingers and toes experimentally. “I don’t think so,” she said. Ruby offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet with effortless steel strength.

They were standing on an outcropping on the side of the caldera. From over the edge came the dull, red-orange glow of fire. Or lava, Jo supposed.

Or a forge.

It was dim in the caldera, the only light source that glow, but around and past Ruby, leading from the edge of the outcropping and wrapping around the inside of the volcano, Jo thought she could see stairs. Stairs leading down by increments toward the glowing belly of the volcano.

Jo eyed them tiredly, and then looked at Ruby.

A human would have exhibited some sense of shame. Ruby just said, deadpan, “We’ve come this far.”

\--

An hour later Ruby peered down over the edge of the rough, un-railed stairs and said, “They can’t go on forever.”

Jo, sitting on a step, propped against the side of the volcano, said, “How about you keep going, then? Come back and tell me what you find. I’ll be here.”

“We both know you’d eventually come looking for me, convinced I was either in trouble or up to no good.”

Jo dropped her head forward onto her knees. “And why is that, do you suppose?”

To that, Ruby had no response.

\--


	2. Chapter 2

\--

The steps went on forever.

Down and down and down. At times so gradual that the grade was unnoticeable, at times so steep they had to drop themselves down over the edge of one step to the next. Jo kept walking straight into exhaustion and past it, through the other side into numbness, her continuing movements becoming more mechanical than the truly mechanical demon who walked silently ahead of her.

Unflagging, untiring. Inhuman.

The heat, building constantly from the exertion of walking, had long ago built past the limit of Jo’s endurance and Ruby (who was temperature sensitive, but not temperature reliant) was now carrying Jo’s coat.

Further on the stairs became more uniform. For most of an hour the steps had been so even that Jo failed to notice that they had ended and tried to step too far, jamming her ankle and barely keeping herself from falling.

She staggered hard and caught herself against Ruby’s shoulder. The demon had stopped stock still at the foot of the stairs, staring at something Jo couldn’t see. She straightened painfully, wincing at the cramping in her thighs and calves, and moved out from behind Ruby.

There was indeed a forge.

A gigantic forge. A forge the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Standing behind it, backlit by the Promethean glow of the molten furnace, was a towering figure. No features were distinguishable, only an immense, shadowy form. A man writ large.

“Holy…” Jo breathed in delirious astonishment.

Ruby smiled. “Holy’ is exactly correct.”

There was a rumbling boom that shook the caldera. Jo staggered, mind going blank with the irrational fear of an eruption. Ruby caught her elbow and kept both of them on their feet.

The booming came again.

“What is that?” Jo shouted.

Ruby frowned, tilting her head to the side, still holding Jo’s arm. “I think… I think he might be talking,” she said slowly.

“That’s talking?”

“He’s a god,” Ruby shouted. “What makes you think you could comprehend him at all?”

Jo rolled her eyes as another rumbling bout of ‘speech’ forced her to one knee. “We are so not having this conversation here and now.”

Ruby made a face and dropped to the ground beside Jo. She lowered herself further, pressing her ear to the stone.

“What are you doing?”

“Hush,” said Ruby, “I’m trying to hear.”

Jo considered the unlikely picture Ruby made lying full length on the bottom of a volcano trying to listen to a god. “What happened to being unable to comprehend a god?”

Ruby shushed her again, eyes closed and concentrating.

“It doesn’t really matter what he’s saying. He doesn’t know what we came here for,” Jo pointed out.

“So ask him,” said Ruby without opening her eyes.”

Jo stared down at her. “Are you serious? You’re serious. Are you insane?”

Ruby smiled against the dusty stone floor of Hephaestus’ forge.

Jo rolled her eyes and dragged herself back up to her feet. Too exhausted in body and mind to manage the proper level of deference at which one should properly address a god, or even something which only thinks it’s a god, she settled for shouting, “We seek the Key!” at the top of what was left of her voice.

There was a protracted silence. The great shadowy figure gave the featureless impression of studying her.

The rumbling, booming voice came again.

“You have come far,” said Ruby, slowly, translating through the vibration of the stone. “That might be a question,” she added. “Inflection is difficult to discern through bedrock.”

“Yes, we have come far,” Jo shouted. “The Visionary sent us. We seek the Key.”

The silence this time stretched for an interminable age of perhaps half a minute. And then the caldera shook with a response.

“Made the Key,” said Ruby. “Made a…deal? Made a deal and made the Key.”

“A deal?” Jo said. Ruby shrugged.

“Who did you make the Key for? What does it open?”

“Opens the light. Opens the light for the… angel.”

Jo staggered. “It’s a key… to run an angel?”

Ruby raised her head off the ground. “It makes a certain sort of sense, I suppose. Demons run with Keys, outside of Heaven something has to run an angel. It’s the problem Castiel has always faced.”

“I know,” said Jo. “I just never thought a key would be the answer.”

“Ask him where it is.” Ruby put her head back down. But to that query, there was no response. Nor could they induce Hephaestus to tell them which angel he had made the Key for, or if indeed he had made the Key directly for an angel at all.

His silence in response to repeated questions became intensely frustrating to Ruby who, in a rare display of temper, unwisely attempted to provoke the smith-god.

Forever after, Jo would remember their headlong rush back up the stairs, barely keeping ahead of the molten fury that pounded at their heels, as one of the absolute worst trials of her misspent life.

\--

“Well,” Jo panted, clinging to the rope of the ladder, “I don’t know if that was helpful or not, but it was almost certainly a bad idea.”

Ruby looked up at her, tireless steel claws gripping the wooden step. “We know we’re looking for an angel, now,” she said. “That narrows it down somewhat. How many angels can there be on earth outside the presence of God?”

“Not too many, I suppose. But how the hell are we going to find one?” Jo tilted her head back, unhappily contemplating the climb back up to the Dashforth. “How do you find an angel?”

Ruby hooked a hand over the next step. “I have no idea,” she said.

  
\--

They found later that the cyclonic winds had battered the Dashforth against the rim of the volcano, closing a vent and causing a breech when pneumatic pressure built up in the pipe. Jo gave Ruby the helm and changed into the grease-stained bottom half of a pair of mechanic’s coveralls she had appropriated from Bobby’s several years ago.

She was deep in the bowels of the ship, goggles pulled down over her eyes, her arms covered in scratches and motor oil, when she found a second crack. Jo flung the wrench across the engine room, hearing it clang sharply off the edge of the hydrogen tank. Dangerous, that.

“God damn it!,” she shouted at the ceiling.

“Zounds and blue blazes,” Ruby drawled behind her, correctively. “He may be listening.”

Jo felt her hands curl into fists.”Go away, Ruby.”

The demon touched the back of her shirt lightly, teasingly. Running the tip of one steel claw along the edge of her braces. Jo swallowed hard and fought back a shiver.

“Not now,” she rasped.

Ruby hummed noncommittally and pressed closer. The starched edge of her collar scratched at the back of Jo’s neck.

“No,” Jo said, striving for an authoritative tone and missing completely. She took a deep breath, feeling Ruby’s claws prick through her shirt with the movement, and tried again. “Go away. I’m busy and I’m not in a good-”

“I need to be wound,” Ruby cut in.

Jo let the rest of the breath she’d been holding go and strove for rationality through her frustration. Part of her wanted to refuse, let Ruby wind down for the sake of petulance alone. She told that part it was childish and did not befit a hunter.

“All right,” she said.

\--

Ruby’s cabin was spacious, but every inch of it managed to be suffused with her presence. Black cloth in the shapes and forms of her various dresses and skirts and shawls and veils covered every available surface as though shadows had draped themselves piecemeal to soften the edges of the otherwise sparse room. Ruby had a great deal of clothing, and not much of anything else. She didn’t need much, and had a distressing tendency to borrow Jo’s weapons and hairpins and clean towels whenever she wanted.

She stopped in the middle of the room, and turned her back to Jo, waiting. When Jo made no move to come any closer, Ruby looked over her shoulder and smiled. Wickedness, encouragement, temptation. Impatience in the heat in her eyes.

Jo steeled herself and closed the distance between them, putting her hands to the dozens of tiny jet buttons that ran down the back of Ruby’s dress. She looked up to see that Ruby was still watching over her shoulder. Her eyes fixed and intense on Jo’s face.

“Turn around,” Jo said, brusquely, and Ruby turned her head, letting Jo reach the buttons that ran all the way to the nape of her neck. Her hands were unsteady as they slipped the buttons through the fabric one by one, slowly freeing Ruby from the widow’s black she preferred. Jo came to the end of the buttons and helped Ruby lift the dress over her head.

The sound of her own breathing was loud in the room beside Ruby’s inhuman stillness. The cheating little minx often chose not to breathe. Jo privately thought it was because not breathing –she wormed her fingers underneath the edge of Ruby’s corset – allowed her to cinch her waist to an otherwise impossible diameter.

“You’re only jealous,” Ruby said. She jerked sharply and took a breath at last as Jo tugged some slack into the corset lacing.

“I don’t wear corsets,” Jo said. “And get out of my head.” She started pulling the laces free.

“I wasn’t in your head, Jo. I don’t need to read your mind to know when you’re thinking about me.”

Jo continued sliding the laces through their grommets with ruthless speed. “I wasn’t thinking about you,” she lied.

Ruby laughed loudly as Jo undid the last of the laces, leaving her in her chemise and petticoats- Ruby never wore hoops. Or drawers, for that matter. Jo squashed that thought violently and turned her around by the shoulders.

“Lie down,” she said.

Ruby smiled, pliant and reasonable, and arranged herself on her bed, flat on her back and bare from the waist up, her chemise draped unbuttoned around her shoulders. The small brass plaque that covered her latchkey gleamed in the lamplight like a coin.

Jo took the Key out of its box, burningly conscious of Ruby spread out like a conquered thing, watching her down the length of her own body. Her breasts rising and falling with the breath she didn’t need. Her eyes an infinitely patient temptation.

The Key, Ruby’s Key, was roughly the length of Jo’s hand, and made of a metal (Brass? Steel?) that never needed polishing. A circle roughly an inch and a half in diameter supported two parallel prongs, each with protrusions away from the other for turning the tumblers. Two on one side and three on the other.

Jo took a steadying breath, told herself this was, in fact, the responsible thing to do, and put her right knee on the bed beside Ruby’s hip, swinging her left leg up and around to straddle her hips. Ruby, blessedly, refrained from any lascivious comment, though she did rest her hands on Jo’s knees and run her clawed fingertips lightly up her thighs. Jo fought back the urge to arch into Ruby’s touch.

“Stop that,” she said, carefully turning the Key over so that the side with two prongs was on the right. “I don’t want you accidentally clawing me.”

Ruby obediently dropped her hands to the bedspread, her eyes avid and hot on Jo’s face. Jo still wasn’t sure if being wound felt good or not. Pleasure and pain were much the same to a demon.  
The latch was slightly to the left (Ruby’s left) of the center of Ruby’s chest, halfway down her ribcage. Jo flipped the cover to the side and lined up the key. She flicked her eyes up to Ruby’s face, raising her eyebrows a little, questioningly.

“Get on with it, then,” Ruby said, her voice raspy with anticipation. “I haven’t got all - ”

Jo slid the Key into her chest, slowly, watching Ruby throw her head back and fight to hold still. Self control wasn’t Ruby’s defining characteristic, but moving might throw off the clockwork, and Jo’s weight was nothing in face of Ruby’s strength. The mattress made a series of horrible creaking sounds as Ruby dug her claws into it.

Practice had taught Jo to feel carefully for the tumblers before attempting to turn the Key, which she did. A feat made more difficult by Ruby’s shivering.

“Hold still,” Jo murmured in what she hoped was a soothing tone. She prayed her voice wouldn’t shake; any sign of excitement on Jo’s part would only serve to make Ruby wilder.

“I’m trying,” Ruby promised, breathily. “Maybe you should tie me down.” She managed an impressive amount of innuendo despite the difficultly she seemed to be having forming words.

They used to tie Ruby down. Jo claimed it was no longer necessary because she no longer worried about Ruby hurting her, accidentally or otherwise, but in truth she didn’t trust herself tying Ruby to the bed anymore.

Jo felt the Key slot into place with a dull ‘click’ and Ruby gasped.

“Need a minute?” Jo teased, unwisely. She gave the Key the first clockwise quarter turn and Ruby made a soft, desperate sound, hooked the claws on her left hand in Jo’s leather belt, and writhed under her.

Winding, Jo reflected with the fragment of her mind that wasn’t lost in Ruby, shaking and undone and beautiful as midnight, was just the kind of singularly inconvenient method of subsistence that only demons would come up with.

She gave the Key another quarter turn. And then another. Click, click of the coils and springs ratcheting tighter. Ruby moaned, tugging at Jo’s shirt with restless, grasping hands. Jo became dimly aware that she was panting for breath, and didn’t forestall her when Ruby tugged her braces off her shoulders.

Click, click, click. Three quarters of a turn. Ruby plucked at the buttons of Jo’s shirt and whimpered when Jo put a hopelessly inadequate hand on her stomach to hold her still.

Another full turn. Ruby had let this go too long. She’d been close to winding down completely.

Jo leaned in closer, giving more leverage to the next turn of the Key and murmured, “You take too many risks.”

Ruby laughed breathlessly. Kite-flying high on the slow, delicious tension of being wound. She hooked her claws through the plain cotton of Jo’s shirt and dragged her all the way down.

\--

Jo nudged the wheel straight, wincing as the carelessly pressed fabric of her shirt pulled over the myriad scratches Ruby couldn’t help but leave all over her skin.

She saw the flash from the corner of her eye, forty miles out over the Aegean. Jo told herself it was the sun on the water, or the steel of the fuselage, but then she saw it again and really, nothing gleams in the sun quite like the wings of an angel.

“Better bring one of the ramparts down,” she said, assuming Ruby’s soundless presence behind her. “I think Castiel wants to talk.”

The presence of angels was still odd to Jo. Demons and ghosts and angry things which thought they were gods she could handle, philosophically. But she’d always had trouble with angels. It didn’t help that the sight of a man in Savile Row tailoring sweeping out of the sun on wings easily twenty feet wide and fashioned of some extraordinary indestructible metal would never, ever cease to amaze her.

Castiel stepped easily onto the deck of the rampart and the last rays of weak sunlight flashed off the sharp-edged steel alloy of his wings as he folded them in at the hinges and made them disappear.

Ruby’s eyes went completely black. She (and Castiel) purported this to be a demonic response to the presence of the divine. Jo, in view of Ruby’s clockwork soul and Castiel’s metalcraft wings, thought it must be some sort of electromagnetic switch.

The angel and the demon sized each other up for a long uncomfortable moment, as they did every time they came into contact. Jo did not even consider intervening, and said nothing until Castiel shifted his attention with a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgment.

“Hello, Jo,” he said finally, in his careful, deliberate way.

“Hello, Cas,” she said. “I don’t suppose this is a social call?”

The angel moved further into the ship, allowing the rampart to close. He appeared to be considering the rhetorical question. “No,” he said. “Bobby said you were attacked in relation to the prophecy Sam and Dean Winchester sent to you.”

Jo settled her hip against a barrel dried fruit. “Yes,” she said. “Lilith’s demons in the marketplace. They were after this “Key.”

Castiel tilted his head and looked at her as though checking for injury. “Have you discovered anything further about the…Key?”

When a quick glance showed clearly that Ruby was clinging to silence, Jo said, “Yes. We talked to the Visionary, and then we… we talked to Hephaestus.”

The angel looked surprised. “That was very dangerous.”

Jo shot her eyes at Ruby again. “Yes,” she said. “So we discovered. But, this might be of interest to you: Hephaestus told us it was a Key to run an angel.”

Castiel went even further statue-still than usual. “A Key to run an angel?”

“That’s what he said.” He must be worried about winding down, Jo thought. How long has he been cut off from Heaven? A year, almost?

“That is most interesting.

“I thought so,” Jo said. “We’re having some trouble deciding how to find an angel, though.”

“There are many angels on Earth,” Castiel said. “But angels on Earth outside the dominion of Heaven…” He trailed off, turning his head as though listening for something and was silent for several minutes.

Jo looked over at Ruby, who had wedged the considerable volume of her skirts between a shipping crate full of miscellaneous spare engine parts and a lady’s traveling wardrobe that had belonged to Jo’s mother.

Her eyes were still black. And they were fixed on the angel.

Castiel held out an arm. The airship pilot in Jo automatically noted the direction (north north-west) and the angle of inflection (approximately thirty degrees).

“There,” he said. “I cannot guarantee this is the angel for whom Hephaestus made the Key, but it is an angelic sign that is… unusual.”

“Thank you, Castiel,” Jo said.

The angel fixed his overwhelmingly bright blue eyes on her. “Be careful,” he said. “It concerns me that Lilith seeks this Key. It concerns me greatly.”

“It concerns me, too, Cas,” Jo promised. “It concerns me very much.”

\--

“Are you sure about this?” Jo shouted back over the howl of the wind.

Ruby made a horrible face and fought with the helm as a side gust caught under the edge of the starboard wing and tried to shove the Dashforth into the Alps. The storm was getting bad, building itself up into a ship killer tempest. Jo had given Ruby the helm when she’d been thrown across the bridge as the wind forced the ship to spin like a child’s toy.

“I don’t think Castiel knows quite what lying is,” said Ruby as she held the helm steady against driving sideways rain with steel-alloy strength.

“That’s not,” said Jo as the ship swung dizzingly under the push of the storm, “exactly what I meant.”

“Dammit,” Ruby cut in. “Cut the starboard engines before we hit the mountains.”

Jo obediently flipped levers and watched the dials swing to zero, feeling the ship even out briefly.

“If you mean,” said Ruby, “’should we really be trying to fly through this,’ yes, I’m sure.”

Jo carefully adjusted the hydrogen mix to feed a little more power to the port engines now bracing the ship against the southbound storm. “Really.”

“Well, yes, I..” Ruby staggered as the ship tilted, forcing Jo to grab the bronze and crystal altimeter to stay standing, “… feel there is some urgency warranted here. Angels aren’t known for staying in one place very long, and at the moment we have the best information we’re going to get, but it has an expiration date.”

The storm punctuated Ruby’s urgency by redoubling its efforts, the rain like chain-gun fire against the hull.

“Ruby.”

“Jo.”

The view from the port windscreen showed Jo an ancient forest winding up the sides of the mountains. Tree limbs tossing wildly under the deluge like a forest of frantically waving hands.

Jo sighed.

“Take us over the mountains,” she said. “We’ll never make it on this side.”

She wouldn’t turn around. She didn’t need to.

She knew Ruby was smiling.

\--

“So, what’s the plan?” Jo asked several hours of fighting the elements later. “Search the entire city of Paris for an angel?”

Ruby looked sidelong at her and Jo paused in thought. “There’s a joke in there, somewhere,” she said, and Ruby grinned.

“No, dearest,” she said cheerily. “Thanks to Bobby, I have a much better plan.”

Jo felt her eyebrows rise in incredulity. “Bobby talked to you?”

“I sent him a telegram,” said Ruby. “Several words may have been misspelled so that he would believe it to be from you. And he responded,” she continued loudly over Jo’s indignant huff, “with instructions as to modifying that vampire-tracking compass that has been gathering dust in your closet so that it will track an angel.”

She pulled a man’s pocket watch from her reticule and flipped it open to reveal the compass workings inside. She had, Jo noticed, carefully pasted an image of a Michelangelo cupid to the inside cover. The odd, wedge-shaped wooden needle swung sharply as the carriage rounded the corner and started down a broad avenue.

“That compass,” said Jo, “was in a locked box at the back of my also locked wardrobe.”

Ruby hummed vaguely. “And yet,” she murmured.

The needle swung suddenly ninety degrees to point straight right with a sharp ‘thock’, and Ruby thumped Jo’s swordcane against the roof of the carriage as a signal to the coachman who pulled the horses to a halt.

“Here we are then,” said Ruby, smiling. “An angel in Paris.”

  
\--

They were in the theater district, Jo noticed, and was pleased she’d swapped out her oil and bloodstained leathers for pinstriped cotton, Saville Row shoes, and the top hat Bela had sold her once at a horrendous price. Even if things were much less formal in the afternoon.

She turned back to the carriage as Ruby held out one gloved hand, her widow’s black crepe and veils making her look more delicate than she was. Jo took it gingerly, feeling the inhuman strength in the fingers around her own, and handed her down from the carriage. She wished she could refuse, but habit made her offer Ruby her arm. The demon curled in close, sharp steel claws through her glove and Jo’s sleeve making indents in her flesh.

The demon was raptly consulting the compass, the swordcane propped against her side. She looked from the compass to the buildings and back several times and finally said, “Here,” tucked the compass away, caught up the swordcane again, and tugged Jo back the way they’d come.

The building Ruby had decided on was a decidedly lowbrow theater in a state of disrepair which invited patrons to tempt fate by entering. ‘Le Teatre Jardin’ was written across the front in flaking paint.

Jo frowned in half-recognition. “Wait a minute,” she said, digging the broadside she’d been reading in the carriage back out of her pocket.

“What is it?” Ruby asked, peering curiously over the edge of the sheet of cheap newsprint.

“This theater.” Jo looked at the sign again and then back down at the paper. “Yes. Le Teatre Jardin. It’s a cheap playhouse. Burlesque comedies, that sort of thing. The critics have turned it into a synonym for, well, bawdy. Poorly produced.” She scanned the article again as Ruby tugged impatiently at her arm with implacable steel strength.

“Wait, wait!” Jo tried unsuccessfully to reclaim her arm. “Look, it’s been getting amazing reviews for the last several weeks, there’s a whole editorial about it.”

“How lovely,” said Ruby. “Perhaps we can catch a show later. Come on!”

Since it was go willingly or be dragged, Jo tossed the paper aside carelessly and tried to look like she was leading Ruby up the rickety wooden steps rather than being led. The inside of the theater yawned wide past the cramped little lobby. Jo said a brief prayer for architectural soundness to any god who might be listening, and let Ruby pull her past the sagging double doors into the theater proper.

The inside of the theater, they found, was quite different than the façade. Where the clapboard fronting suggested the building had formerly been a tavern, or perhaps a tannery, the inside gave the impression of a grand opera gone to seed.

It was larger than Jo would have guessed and there was a sense of shabby grandeur in the moth-eaten upholstery and carved hand rails defaced with chips and at least three layers of slightly different paint. Several workmen were repairing an ominous hole in the floor.

“Hmm,” said Ruby. She flipped the compass back out and consulted it carefully, occasionally glancing up at the stage where a rehearsal for something that involved several scantily clad women and a large, four poster bed was taking place.

Jo looked up at the ceiling where cobwebs liberally strewed a glass chandelier coated in soot and the grime of a hundred performances now illuminated by gaslight.

“This way,” said Ruby, tugging again at Jo’s greatly abused arm, and led the way down the aisle to the stage.

The director, distracted by Ruby’s sauntering entrance, took in the cut and quality of their clothes and said, “May I help you, ladies?”

Ruby looked back down at the compass and appeared completely unwilling to answer. Jo opened her mouth with no idea of what she would say, and was saved from having to admit it when one of the women said, “I think they’re looking for me, George.”

The woman who had spoken was on the bed, half wrapped around, half leaning against one of the posts. She was dangling one leg over the footboard, her petticoat tossed high enough to bare her pale blue garter and the unskillfully darned hole in her silk stocking. From this angle, her main talent seemed to be her ability to slouch provocatively in a tightly laced, whalebone corset.

Which in this place undoubtedly made her the lead actress.

“Ah,” said Jo, as Ruby continued to frown at the wildly spinning compass, “We’re not fans. We’re actually looking for…”

She trailed off as the actress rolled her eyes and flapped an impatient hand at the others on stage, making them disappear. Instantly.

Jo gasped and spun. The other actors, the workmen at the back, everyone was gone. They were alone in the theater.

“Allow me to guess,” said the actress, wrapping herself more comfortably around the bed post, “you came here looking for an angel.”

She was wearing only a corset and petticoats, all of good material, silk brocade and handmade lace, all in shades of cream and ivory and eggshell. Her dark hair tumbled in an unconstrained fall, and the short sleeve of her chemise slipped over one shoulder.

A shaft of sunlight struck through a high casement window, highlighting the dancing dust motes. The sunlight turned her shabby finery to a glowing, puritanical whiteness. Something spun from starlight and ice.

The woman lowered her eyes demurely, and when she raised them again, they had changed. She looked straight at Jo with bright yellow, slit-pupiled eyes and smiled. “Surprise,” she said.

Jo struggled for her voice, Ruby statue-still beside her. “Clever, clever snake,” she managed.

The Serpent grinned.

\--

“I…what?” Ruby looked from the Serpent to the compass, which seemed to be attempting to crawl inside itself. Or possibly point straight up, no mean feat for a fixed needle.

Ordinarily, the sight of Ruby at a loss for words was one of Jo’s favorite things. In this particular instance, she would have more appreciated another of her typical smarmy explanations. As one did not appear to be forthcoming, Jo leapt a little desperately into the breach.

“Obviously, there’s something wrong with the compass,” she said.

Ruby scowled at her. “There’s nothing wrong with the bloody compass,” she gritted out, carefully articulating every syllable, a sure sign she was furious.

“Ruby…”

“There’s nothing wrong!” said the demon in a tone verging on hysteria.

The Serpent appeared to be watching the proceedings with great amusement.

“It’s supposed to find vampires,” Jo offered.

“But it didn’t find a vampire, did it?” Ruby cast a pointed glare at the woman now reclining across the footboard in a manner her corsetry should have rendered impossible. “It found a Trickster masquerading as an angel. Stupid gadget couldn’t tell the difference between the real thing and a child playing dress-up.”

“Ruby,” Jo said tiredly, “I’m pretty sure that’s the Serpent of Eden you’re lampooning.”

The Serpent – it had to be the Serpent - arched one carefully plucked eyebrow, and Ruby seemed to remember herself.

“No offense intended,” she added as a hesitant afterthought.

Jo winced and, remembering everything Dean had told her about Tricksters, prepared to be attacked by an incongruous orangutan.

The Serpent laughed.

“Little clockwork toy,” she said fondly to Ruby. “Don’t fret.” She abandoned her pose of dramatic negligence and sat up straight on the edge of the bed. “There’s nothing wrong with your gadget.”

She made some minute movement with her shoulders and the expansive (and probably illusory, Jo reminded herself) theater was filled with a sudden burning white light. Shielding her eyes from the glare and squinting up at the stage, Jo saw the impossible as the Serpent stretched wide a pair of burning wings woven from lighting and the dreams of stars and glowed like a captive sun with impossible, uncontainable power.

Before that all-consuming glory Jo felt nothing more quantifiable than the brush of divine judgment. Ruby’s eyes went black like a switch had been thrown and both women fought the reflexive urge to kneel. To prostrate themselves before that implacable fury and beg for unwarranted mercy.

After an eternity of maybe a minute or so in which entire worlds could have been created and destroyed unnoticed, the light faded. And the woman on the stage became a simply a woman again.

“That,” said Jo hoarsely, “is a trick.” She found she was crying silently.

A deeply shaken Ruby looked down at the compass which she had been clutching at like an ineffectual lifeline. It was actually smoking.

“I rather think it wasn’t,” she said.

The Serpent looked smug.

“Who are you?”

She shrugged, careless. “The Serpent, pet. The first of all Tricksters.”

“I wasn’t aware you were an angel.” Jo traded a look with Ruby, but the demon was dividing her attention between staring confusedly at the Serpent and frustratedly at the goddamn compass.

The Serpent rearranged herself into a more comfortable position. She appeared to be growing bored with the interrogation. “I’m not an angel, idiot child.”

Feeling as though she was missing something important, Jo said, “But the wings are real.”

As the Serpent’s eyes were slit-pupiled, it was impossible to tell if she were rolling them in frustration, but Jo rather thought she might be.

“They’re not mine,” she said in a tone of great exhaustion. “I’m just holding them.”

Ruby frowned up at her. “Why would an angel give you their wings?”

“To hide, obviously.” The Serpent looked pointedly at the compass Ruby was still clutching in a white knuckled, steel clawed grip.

“Why would an angel need to hide?”

The Serpent smiled slowly. “Perhaps he didn’t wish to be an angel any longer.”

\--


	3. Chapter 3

\--

 _In the confused aftermath of the Fall one thing seemed very clear to the Host of Heaven: the Serpent was guilty of_ something.

 _No less a personage than the archangel Gabriel himself went after her. The power and fury of his presence scorched the air on her trail. Her splinter worlds crumbled with the echo of his footsteps. The obstacles she threw in his path had a distressing tendency to turn and run rather than detain him._

 _But the Serpent was nothing if not adaptable, and the Serpent learned._

 _She learned to make simpler, sturdier worlds. Worlds that were more like great mirrors for Gabriel’s own perception. Mirrors that would not burn. Reflections that could not flee. She learned. And she ran from him for centuries with great success._

 _Gabriel learned as well. He learned to walk softly between the traps the Serpent laid for him. How to tell the difference between the illusions his presence could sweep away and the reflections he must avoid._

 _He learned to spot the Serpent by the tricks she continued to play on the humans whose lives passed in an eyeblink, generation to generation, as he hunted her._

 _And he learned to make worlds of his own._

 _Worlds like a lacquerware box with a hidden key. A thousand ways inside and no way out. Worlds of temptation the way the Serpent understood it. The temptation of fools and power._

 _Centuries of hunting the Serpent taught him what the Fallen already knew. Gabriel, alone of all the Host of Heaven, came to understand desire._

 _The Serpent rushed gleefully into his box-world and he closed it around her like a cage. The surprise and sudden fear in her eyes redeemed all the long lost kingdoms that had risen, decayed, and fallen as he searched for her._

 _Gabriel took her back to Heaven where he found his Father gone, and his brothers at war. Michael clapped a hand on his shoulder in congratulations and looked at the Serpent with a glowing ecstasy of hatred in his eyes._

 _“Good, brother. Her knowledge is a weapon we shall wield against Lucifer. Surely the first of all Tricksters will know the workings of the Gates of Hell.”_

 _Gabriel made himself smile back. But having learned to discern true emotion from illusion he knew his satisfaction to be false. And he knew the Serpent was watching._

 _Two of the Host came forward at Michael’s gesture to drag her away in chains. As she passed by him she pressed close. Her lips against his cheek._

 _“I can give you what you want.”_

 _She whispered it so soft he knew no other had heard. He was not even certain she had actually spoken aloud. But he watched her as they dragged her from Michael’s hall, meeting her yellow eyes over her shoulder as she looked back at him, and he trembled._

 _He had not understood Lucifer’s rebellion before, but he understood now._

 _She had taught him to want.  
_

\--

“Gabriel got you out of Heaven.”

The Serpent did a slight thing with her eyebrows which suggested a nod.

“Why would he trust you?”

“It’s amazing,” said the Serpent, “what you can talk yourself into when your other options are unbearable.”

“And then?”

“You know this part.” She was definitely bored with them. “I got Hephaestus to make a key that would run Gabriel once he was cut off from Heaven. Gabriel gave me his wings to hold so that none would be able to find him. I can’t use the wings very often, you understand. The power would burn me out from the inside.”

“Why would Hephaestus do that for you? Make a key like that? I got the impression it took a lot of work and a very long time.”

The Serpent aimed her self-satisfied smirk at the arched ceiling. “I don’t think that’s important,” she said.

Ruby frowned suddenly, suspicious. “Why are you telling us all this? Surely you wouldn’t give up a secret like that so easily.”

The Serpent switched her gaze to the far wall and re-crossed her legs. “I think it’s time for the Key to be known,” she said. She continued to smile in a vaguely unsettling way. Amusement blended with power and remorseless cruelty.

Jo waved it off. “Whatever. Fine. The demons want it now.”

“Yes, I expect they would.” The Serpent stretched, lazily.

There was a long silence. Jo and Ruby stared at the Serpent. The Serpent appeared to be considering the ceiling again. Or maybe the Heavens.

Jo gritted her teeth. “Why do the demons want it?”

The Serpent raised her eyebrows, the picture of oblivious surprise.

“How else would Lucifer rise?”

\--

Jo watched Ruby drip laudanum onto a cube of sugar. She scraped the tips of her claws together until she managed a spark. They both stared at the flame as the sugar burned and melted and slipped through the slots in the spoon into the violently green liquor.

“Lucifer,” said Jo.

Ruby nodded. She tipped the remaining sugar in the glass and swished it around with the slotted spoon.

“Lucifer as in… Lucifer.”

“Yes,” said Ruby, in a voice completely devoid of inflection. She pushed the glass across the table.

The wormwood was bitter and poisonous. The opium was weirdly smoky. It tasted like nothing. Like water. Like sand.

It was Jo’s fourth.

Ruby watched Jo stare blankly at the glass somewhat impatiently until she looked up, registering the silence.

“We have to go after it,” she said.

Jo put on a doubtful expression, probably. She couldn’t quite feel her face. “Isn’t that more Sam and Dean’s deal? The apocalypse is their… thing. Raison d’être.”

Ruby leaned across the table with just a shade too much eagerness. The slotted absinthe spoon tumbled clattering to the floor. “Sam and Dean are on the other side of the world somewhere. Unless you want to try summoning Castiel and explaining this whole thing to him, because I don’t think a telegram is going to quite suffice.”

“How do you summon an angel, anyway?”Jo mused out loud.

“You don’t. They come and go as they bloody well please,” said Ruby, impatiently. “Look, this is it. The big one. We have a chance to prevent Lucifer from rising. Prevent the whole show.”

Jo sighed. “Are we even certain the Key would run Lucifer? It was made for Gabriel.”

“People make a big deal about Lucifer, but fundamentally an archangel is an archangel. Not much difference between Gabriel and Lucifer at that level. It’ll work. We have to keep it out of Lilith’s hands,” said Ruby.

She leaned back in her seat and studied Jo. “Not to mention, if we find the Key, we find Lilith.”

Jo felt the corners of her mouth twist involuntarily and she touched the cool metal of the photo locket under her shirt.

“You want to kill Lilith? This is how we trap her.”

“How do we find the Key?”

Ruby dug the compass back out of her reticule and Jo groaned. “Not the damn compass again. Look where it got us!”

“It got us to some answers, didn’t it?” said Ruby stubbornly. “I convinced the Serpent to… alter it a little. It should find Gabriel now.”

“How did you convince her to help?”

Ruby poked at the last dregs of the absinthe. “Never you mind.”

“I can’t believe we met the Serpent of Eden.”

“I know!”

Jo and Ruby made comical shocked faces at each other.

“It’s the Old Testament greatest hits around here lately.”

Ruby smiled faintly before sobering. “Jo, this is it. This is our shot.”

“I know.” Jo scratched irritably at the peeling lacquer of the restaurant table. She sighed.

“Let’s go find a fugitive archangel.”

\--

Jo quickly grew tired of following the compass. Especially since this… quest, this job seemed determined to fly them in circles, retracing their steps.

They flew back over the Alps into Northern Italy. Sheer cliff faces swept past, majestic, remote. Untouched by the play of clouds over their heights. If there were people living here, Jo didn’t see any, leaning against the windscreen, shaking the feeling back into her hands after clearing ice from the sails.

But once she saw a dragon. A great, skeletal shape with membranous wings floating like a kite, riding the thermals. Jo held her breath as it circled the Dashforth, curious, and then watched it hunt bighorn sheep on the cliffs, grasping with steel edged talons, until they moved too far ahead and the dragon was blocked from sight by a snowy mountain peak.

Jo glanced over her shoulder and Ruby smiled indulgently at her wonder, but said nothing to disparage it.

When they finally cleared the mountains the countryside was green and flushed with snow-melt. The first tiny, shepherd villages began to appear.

“The compass is being odd,” Ruby said. “I think we should go down.”

\--

The compass led them past a sagging fence and down a dirt path toward what had clearly once been a hay barn, now refurbished into a smelting plant. Ruby swept the hem of her dress heedlessly through the mud, keeping one eye on the compass needle. Jo stepped quickly after her, her boots water stained enough already that she didn’t bother avoiding puddles.

She put her foot down on a half-buried cobblestone that shifted suddenly and sent her staggering against a stack of lumber. Jo caught herself with one hand in a pile of rusted tools and came out clutching a steam boiler bolt.

“Come on!” Ruby hissed at her, impatiently. Jo made a face at her, shoved the bolt into her pocket with half a thought of using to weight her fist if this came to a fight, and followed as quickly and quietly as she could.

Ruby circled the structure to the nearest set of double doors and both women pressed themselves against the warm, cracked wood. The whole building had faded to grey with age, bleached by the sun and splotched with lichen. Jo could hear, and feel, machinery running. Pumps, probably, she thought.

“Do you think there are people inside?”

Ruby looked down at the compass. “There had better be,” she said. “Because if this is a trick…” she broke off suddenly at the sound of someone starting a slow clap.

“What?” she mouthed to Jo.

Jo shrugged in response, raised her eyebrows in a silent question. Ruby nodded. Jo pulled her flintlock from her belt.

She counted down from three on her fingers and they came fast around the door to find –

“Sam?”

Samuel Winchester opened his mouth like a stunned fish. “Jo?”

“Dean?” Ruby’s voice was full of affronted incredulity.

Dean looked at her, and then at Jo. “You still travel with this harpy?”

Ruby ignored him, looked back down at the compass the Serpent had altered for her. “That twisted little _snake_!”

Jo frowned past the Winchesters at an unassuming man in casual country tweeds… standing in the middle of a ring of fire.

“Boys? Who is that?”

Dean glanced back over his shoulder. “The Trickster. Or, apparently, an angel. I love it when I’m right.”

“All such rare experiences are enjoyable,” Ruby agreed sweetly.

“Don’t worry,” said Sam. “The holy fire contains him. We just figured it out. No idea who he is, yet.”

Jo stared at the man. He smirked at her.

Ruby dug her claws into the compass hard enough to score the metal with an ear splitting screech. “I’m going to find that double dealing snake and make boots of her,” she promised no one in particular.

The angel trapped in the ring of fire looked amused.

“Sam, Dean,” said Jo slowly, “that’s the archangel Gabriel. And this is feeling more and more like a trap.”

Dean looked rather taken aback. “That’s the who now?”

Ruby frowned. “I… really?”

Jo looked around. There were two sets of wide double doors in the converted barn. The hayloft had been repurposed and now a series of pipes carried water from the river to cool the currently dormant furnace. The pumps she’d heard from outside were working to move the water through the pipes that ran up from the river into the hayloft, and then along the ceiling to the furnace.

“The Serpent has his wings, remember?” she said of the still smirking Gabriel, “I’m amazed the compass found him at all. But listen, something is _not right_.”

“Of course not,” said the archangel Gabriel. “There should be a marching band.” He made as if to snap his fingers.

“No!” Sam, Dean, and Jo shouted together.

There was a brilliant, electric flare like a lightning flash and suddenly Castiel was among them. He didn’t bother to fold his wings, a sure sign of trouble.

Dean frowned in confusion. “Cas?”

Gabriel raised his eyebrows. “Hello, brother,” he said in a tone of faint surprise.

Castiel, with an air of deep distraction, said, “Gabriel.” He looked at Jo. “This is a trap.”

“Yes,” said Jo. She looked at Gabriel, pinned in a circle of fire. “A trap for who?”

“I don’t know. But they’ve followed you here.” Castiel looked back at Gabriel, and then at Dean.

“Get them out of here,” said Jo.

Sam frowned. “What?”

Castiel did not waste time on explanations. Normally, this irritated Jo to absolutely no end. Now she watched, relieved, as he crossed the factory floor, touched two fingers to Sam and Dean, and all three disappeared.

\--

Ruby seemed rather surprised at the vanishing act.

“I don’t want them in the line of fire when we don’t even know what’s going on,” Jo explained.

“Good plan,” said the archangel Gabriel. “Things never go well when those chowderheads are around.”

“You, be quiet,” Jo snapped irritably. The number of possible entrances concerned her. “No, wait,” she said to Gabriel, “explain this Key prophecy.”

He frowned in seemingly genuine confusion. “What Key prophecy?”

“The Key Hephaestus made,” Ruby said impatiently, to Jo’s faint surprise. Ruby rarely spoke to angels. “The Key that runs you. That Key”

“You watch your tone with me, demon,” Gabriel warned.

Ruby’s eyes were solid black, but she was probably rolling them. “Or you’ll do what to me, exactly? Joke me to death?”

“Why were we sent to find the Key?” Jo cut in. “What are we supposed to do, or prevent, here?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Search me. The only thing this Key does is run me.”

“Or Lucifer,” said Jo.

Gabriel looked uncomfortable at his brother’s name. “Or Lucifer,” he agreed. “But he’s trapped in Hell. No need for a Key, there. Demons would have to spring him from jail first and that’s kind of a complicated prospect.”

Jo frowned. “Then why the prophecy? Why send us to find the Key?”

“Are you serious?” Gabriel squinted at her, and then threw his hands up in disgust. “Humans, I swear. I love you guys, but…” he shook his head sadly.

“What?” Jo snapped. She checked the cartridges in her flintlock pistol.

“The question you should be asking here, is _who_ would send you to find the Key. And then follow you,” Gabriel said as though talking to a severely challenged nine year old. “Who wants the Key, sweetheart?”

Jo stared at him. “This is definitely and absolutely a trap,” she said, starting back across the floor. “We should have secured these doors.”

“Yes,” said Ruby sadly. “It is, unfortunately, too late for that.”

Jo looked back at her. “What?”

The double doors she was standing in front of slammed open. She whirled, fired, and took down the first demon that came at her, less on account of having a very rapid reaction time, than being very, very well drilled. But no amount of training would overcome brute force, and the demons behind that one caught her arms and her boot when she kicked out at them and even her hair when she refused to hold still.

They dragged her upright and held her caged with steel strength. Her limbs locked into immobility. The one with a hand in her hair combed his claws through the strands, using the grip to wrench her head around and force her line of sight. Jo hissed a word she hoped her mother had never heard her use, and tried fruitlessly to jerk free.

“Now, now,” said a horrifyingly familiar voice. “A lady never uses such language.”

The demon Lilith sashayed through the doors as though the dust and mud and machinery were merely stage props and scenery and the world was her stage. She paused beside the assembly line tables to shake her finger in mock admonition at Jo.

The top of her head did not quite reach the work surface.

“Josephine,” she said with a coy little smile. “How nice to see you.”

Lilith had not changed at all, of course. Jo had nonsensically expected her to grow up, to someday be something other than the little, immutable porcelain doll. Her ringlet curls were very blonde, her teeth were perfect, tiny pearls, her miniature lady’s walking dress was high-necked, blood red satin, and her painted blue eyes were midnight black in Gabriel’s presence.

She was only three feet tall.

“Did you miss me? I missed you, Jo.” She ran a gloved fingertip along the dusty underside of the machine beside her and added, “I missed your dear, sweet mother, too. Even though she was very rude to me.” The demon pouted in mock offense.

Jo clenched her teeth hard around the useless, furious words that crawled up her throat and said nothing, still struggling because she couldn’t not, as Lilith tiptoed closer. “Surprised to see me?” the demon asked. “I’ve been following your exploits most carefully, thanks to darling, dearest Ruby.”

Lilith turned and held her hands out to Ruby, who came forward and swept her veils aside to kiss Lilith’s fingers. “My best girl,” said Lilith fondly. Ruby rose, towering over her diminutive mistress and wouldn’t look at Jo.

“You lying bitch,” said Jo in a tone of strangled disbelief as the demon with a fistful of her hair forced her neck to an unlikely angle. “You called the Serpent a lying snake? You deserve everything you’re going to get.”

“I’ve only ever been loyal, Jo,” Ruby pleaded. “The most loyal. You talk of demons like we’re nothing but evil machines. How could you expect me to betray my race like that? We’re people, Jo. We have laws, and loyalties, and we can love.”

She brushed the back of her hand very gently across Jo’s cheek. Jo pulled her face away as best she could and the line of Ruby’s mouth pinched in sorrow and anger. “And we have a creator,” she said. Her voice was oddly thick. Had it been anyone else, Jo would have said she was on the verge of tears. She had never seen Ruby cry; she wasn’t sure demons were capable.

“Yes,” said Lilith, with another smile for Ruby as she waved her back. “We have a creator. One who will be, I’m sure. Most pleased with our work here today.” And she turned her attention from Jo to the captive hurricane in the center of the room.

\--

“So,” said Lilith to the archangel Gabriel, “fancy meeting you here.” She giggled. A horrible sound.

Gabriel rolled his eyes with what Jo thought was an unwarranted amount of drama, even for this situation. “As though you didn’t go to considerable trouble for this little soiree. Did you send Sam and Dean after me? And, if so, how did you know where I was?”

“Oh, no, I had nothing to do with Sam and Dean finding you. Sheer, happy chance, that. And I did not, in point of fact, know where you were.” She cut a glance over at Jo. “No, I’m afraid it all hinged on dear little Josephine, here. I knew she’d find you, once she had a reason to look, and then Ruby would tell me.” She beamed at Ruby, who was staring fixedly at the toes of her muddy boots. “Went off without a hitch, actually. Quite a beautiful job, if I do say so myself.”

“You are so very, very far out of your depth here, sugar,” Gabriel told her. “You think Lucifer’s going to rise from his cage, lay his hand on you in benediction and give Earth to the demons and life will be all blood and peaches?”

Lilith smiled faintly. “I think you’re the only one in a cage at the moment.”

“I think you’re an idiot,” said Gabriel without missing a beat. “I know my brother. And I know he’ll throw you away the instant he no longer needs you around to do his dirty work.”

“You’re wrong,” said Lilith in the tone of a teacher correcting a math problem. “Lucifer is the father of my race. Your God may be nothing more than an armed warship, but mine _will_ give us the earth.”

“Well,” Gabriel shrugged,” you cling to your illusions as long as you like. But Lucifer is still trapped. And you still need my Key.”

“And here you are. Demons are perfectly capable of crossing that fire.”

Gabriel laughed. “Bring it on, petunia. I’m an archangel. Which of your little minions will be first in line to jump into the ring with me?”

Lilith’s smile grew both brighter and sharper in a way Jo didn’t like. “Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary.” She looked at Jo. “I’ve studied you, my lord Gabriel,” she said. “I know how you think. And I know that Key isn’t anywhere on your person.”

Jo frowned in confusion, but behind Lilith she saw Gabriel go frighteningly still.

“Josephine,” the demon sing-songed, “give me the Key.”

“I haven’t got the Key. Why do you think we-… I came here? Why would I come if I already had it?”

“I think you lie, dearest,” said Lilith, the petulant childishness of her tone at odds with her suddenly serious expression. “The signs were very clear. At this point, you must have the Key.”

The demon behind Jo tightened his hand in her hair to the point of pain and kept her from shaking her head. “No,” she said to Lilith. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A look of murderous frustration thinned Lilith’s round cheeks. It was less a warning of an impending temper tantrum than it was something to be run from at all costs. It was not an expression that belonged on a child’s face.

“Ruby,” Lilith said in a voice like molten steel, “where is it?”

Ruby looked at Jo. “I don’t know, my lady. I didn’t know she was supposed to have it.” She seemed worried and confused.

Lilith quite literally had smoke coming out of her ears. Jo had never seen a demon get angry enough to heat their internal machinery to the boiling point. She never wanted to see it again.

“Fine,” Lilith gritted out. “Marteus, Jasper, carve the bitch into pieces and find it.”

Jo cursed and tried again to wrench herself away as the demons holding her started to laugh. And then someone shouted, “No!”

Lilith pursed her mouth and looked over at Ruby. Ruby?

“What is it, dearest?” She asked snidely. “Having second thoughts about where your loyalties lie?”

Ruby hesitated. “Of course not,” she said. “This is pointless. She doesn’t have it. I would know if she had it.”

Lilith shrugged. “Then what’s the harm in taking her apart? Don’t we deserve some fun after all our hard work?”

“There’s no point, this is a waste of time!”

“This is why you weren’t told certain things,” said Lilith, a little sadly. “You’ve become too close. Too involved to see the big picture.” She turned back to Jo. “Is that your final answer?”

“Go to Hell,” Jo told her.

“No need dear,” said Lilith. “Hell is coming to us.” She nodded at the two demons holding Jo.

The one with a hand in her hair – Jasper or Marteus, presumably – chuckled and reached for her throat, his claws rusted and saw-edged, and… paused. Jo couldn’t tell at first what had distracted him, and then she felt it, too.

Water droplets.

Lilith turned. The pipe supplying water to the boilers was broken, and standing next to it was Ruby, with a wrench.

“What was the point of that, dearest?” she sighed. “The water isn’t holy.”

“No,” said Ruby. “It’s just water.”

For a long moment Jo, Lilith, and the hench-demons simply stared at her. And then they heard it. The sharp edged sizzle of water hitting fire.

The fire.

Lilith realized what Ruby had done in the same moment Jo did, and whirled around just in time to catch the most fearsome wrath of Heaven straight in the face as Gabriel stepped free of the circle.

\--

Jo leaned against the warm, faded wood of the factory where an hour ago she’d first heard Gabriel applauding the Winchesters’ cleverness.

Gabriel who, from the sound of it, was still amusing himself with Jasper and Marteus.

The last time Jo had seen Lilith, she’d been a scattered collection of cogs and wheels and shattered porcelain. Gabriel’s power had peeled her apart down to the inner mechanisms. To the innocent spirit pinned to a coil cranked tight with the winding of her Key. What he’d done with the spirit she wasn’t sure. Something suitably angelic, she hoped.

She was still there, staring mindlessly at the trampled grass when Gabriel strolled out through the double doors.

“Well, hello there,” he said to Jo with a smile. Evidently smiting demons agreed with him.

Jo simply looked at him, hoping her flat expression conveyed the underlying sentiment. She was too tired to banter.

“Oh, cheer up,” said Gabriel with a smile. “Bad guys vanquished! Evil plot averted! Day saved! Thanks to yours truly. By the way,” he added as Ruby walked forward, unveiled and forlorn, to stand wavering on the threshold, “I wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do with this one, but in my book, she did me a favor.”

Jo rolled her head along the wood to switch her gaze to the woman – the machine – who been her lover, her companion, her only friend. Her betrayer.

Ruby’s eyes were closed, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked… broken.

“Go away,” said Jo to Gabriel. He blinked at her, then shrugged and started to turn before she said, “No, wait. Why did Lilith think I had your Key?”

Gabriel rocked back on his heels and smiled. “She must have had some very accurate prophecy, or a very good seer, tipping her off.”

“But I don’t have it.”

“Oh, actually, you do.” Gabriel strolled back to her. “And I’d like it back, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t have it!”

Gabriel sighed. “It doesn’t look like a Key, you idiot. How stupid do you think I am?”

Jo considered Heaven’s most powerful weapon, standing before her in his casually rumpled suit, his handsome, pointed face open and mocking. “Well,” she said, “you did get trapped by the Winchesters.”

“True. Good point.” Gabriel contrived to look suitably humbled for a moment, and then shook it off and held out his hand. “Key.”

“Still don’t have it.”

“It’s in your pocket, little girl. I haven’t got all day.”

Jo frowned and stuck her hand into her pocket. Compass, hex bag, pencil, piece of wax paper… boiler bolt. She wrapped her hand around that last and pulled it out. When Gabriel gestured for it she dropped it into his outstretched hand, and watched as it shifted and changed, becoming a more recognizable Key like… like Ruby’s.

It was larger. The circle, maybe three inches across, supported three prongs rather than two. The outer two prongs had horizontal bars in groupings of twos and threes, many, many more than a demon’s Key needed. The center prong was longer, and had no bars at all.

“See,” said Gabriel. “You had it the whole time.”

He winked at her, and started off again.

“Castiel,” she shouted after him. He turned back, frowning.

“What about him?”

“He’s cut off from Heaven. He needs a Key.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Even if I were inclined to be self-sacrificing, which I’m not, this Key wouldn’t work for him. It’s archangelic, and made to exact specifications.”

“The technology could still help,” Jo insisted. Gabriel threw his hands up, exasperated.

“Fine,” he said, “I’ll have a word with the Serpent.” He smiled faintly at the thought. “It’s been a while since I… saw her, anyway.” He started walking again, waving jauntily over his shoulder, and this time Jo let him go.

\--

Ruby did not react as Jo walked over to her and stood in the wide doorway. They waited, motionless, the silence between them growing to a level approaching mutually assured destruction. The setting sun gilded Ruby’s cheekbones and set Jo’s hair to a flame-like brightness. Neither moved or spoke.

Jo looked back into the factory, at the scorched earthen floor where they’d trapped an archangel and nearly handed over the planet to Lilith and Lucifer, at the coils and springs and the crushed porcelain hand that was all that was left of the demon who had killed her mother.

She took a deep, slow breath, and let it go.

“You betrayed me,” she said quietly.

Ruby nodded.

“And you betrayed Lilith. Your race.”

Ruby’s mouth pinched into a thin line and tears welled into her eyes. Jo had never seen her cry. Wondering, she closed the distance and lifted one bloodied, soot smudged hand to touch the single perfect tear on Ruby’s face.

“Why?” Jo murmured, soft and close.

Ruby closed her eyes, and when she reopened them they were filled with something almost like resignation and almost like hope. “You know why,” she said.

Jo thought of everything her mother would say. The admonitions about blindness and recklessness and the dangers involved in leaping without looking.

She fisted her bloody, broken nailed hands in Ruby’s unpinned hair, and kissed her mouth.

When she finally pulled back, Ruby eyes were wide, her mouth open and red and very tempting.

Jo smiled at the shocked relief on her face. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Ruby gave her a tentative smile back and twisted her claws in the back of Jo’s jacket. “Where’s home?” she asked.

A playful gust of wind snuck around the corner of the building to tug at Jo’s sleeves and toss Ruby’s hair into wispy disarray. Jo grinned, and snuck another kiss.

“Wherever we want.”

\--

 _fin_


End file.
